Morgan put down the two suitcases she was carrying and walked over to where the two women stood and took her mother’s hand. She squeezed it gently, wordlessly assuring her that she was all right, that everything was going to be all right, that she loved her.
For his part, Jeremy merely stared, his mouth open. The tension in the air may have been beyond Morgan’s experience to understand, but Jeremy recognized it immediately and it carried the whiff of sulphur.
Unlike his niece, he had an excellent idea of what had transpired while they had been fetching the suitcases and wondered, not for the first time, what had possessed them to return to this awful place and willingly put themselves at the mercy of this horrendous woman. He was suddenly wracked with the guilt of not having been enough of a man, enough of a brother to Jack, to find some way to support his niece and his sister-in-law. He’d been an idiot to think Adeline might have changed in the ten years he’d been away, let alone the fifteen Christina had. And now they were trapped in this monstrous house, in this town that had always seemed to him to be a blight on the edge of nowhere.
For now,
he swore to himself.
Just for now. I’m going to figure out how to get us the fuck out of here. I will. I have to.
Adeline stepped in between Christina and Morgan, edging Christina almost imperceptibly to the side with her elbow. She put her arms around Morgan’s shoulders and hugged her tight.
“My family is restored to me,” Adeline said. “Especially my long-lost granddaughter. How very, very wonderful.”
Jeremy shuddered. “Come on, ladies,” he said. “I’ll show you where your rooms are. I think I still know my way around this dump.”
Jeremy took them upstairs,
then excused himself and continued up
the staircase to his own room after bidding them goodnight.
“I’ll be on the next floor up, second door to the left of the corridor,”
he said. He and Christina exchanged a long, meaningful look. “Wake me
up if you need anything at all.
Anything,
” he repeated.
She smiled gratefully and squeezed his hand. “We’re fine. I’m just
going to get Morgan to bed, and then hit the sack myself. I’m worn out.
Are you going to be all right up there?”
“Right as rain,” Jeremy said wryly. “I’ll see you in the morning.
Unless something has changed in the last ten years, breakfast is at seven
in the dining room. Sleep well.”
Once Christina had settled Morgan in the opulent “yellow room” and
put her to bed (with Morgan gushing all the while about how
beautiful
the room with its canopy bed was, and how
great
it was for Grandmother
Adeline to let them stay there, and why didn’t she or Uncle Jeremy
ever
tell her
how nice
she was—until Christina felt she would surely scream),
she unpacked her own suitcases in the room that had been assigned to
her across the hallway from Morgan’s.
Her room was a fraction of the size of Morgan’s and very simply
furnished by comparison. She knew that Adeline was making yet another
point about Christina’s dubious standing in the family, but she didn’t
care. She hadn’t come back to Parr’s Landing in search of any status
Adeline Parr might extend or withhold. She’d come back for exactly what
she’d been given downstairs, however cruelly Adeline had presented the
goods—some security for Morgan and a roof over their heads while she
figured out what to do next. She hadn’t sold her soul to Adeline, though
she may have put it in escrow for the short term.
So be it,
she thought.
Whatever it takes. It’s not forever.
She looked out the window and saw that the moon was going down.
Her watch read three a.m. Christina suddenly felt more tired than she
could ever remember feeling.
She undressed quickly, not even bothering to wash her face or brush
her teeth, and pulled on the red flannel nightgown she’d brought with
her. She climbed into bed and pulled the covers up around her neck. The
room may have been spare, but the mattress was welcoming. As she
closed her eyes, she thought briefly of Jack and wondered if she’d dream
of him tonight, here in the house in which he’d grown up, and what shape
the dreams would take, if and when they came. She hoped they would.
Christina was fast asleep within minutes of laying her head against
the pillow, and for the first time in months, her dreams were entirely
uneventful.
At the exact moment
Christina was falling asleep and the moon was
completing its descent, Richard Weal was butchering a sixty-year-old
widower named Alan Carstairs in his bed, in a remote fishing cabin
just outside the town of Gyles Point, twenty-five miles south of Parr’s
Landing, on the shore of Lake Superior.
Weal had broken in soundlessly—the door had been unlocked, of
course—and surprised Carstairs, who was dreaming of his late wife,
Edith.
He hadn’t been able to bring himself to come up to the cabin at
all during the three years since her lingering death from cancer. Today,
finally, he had. He’d driven to the cabin, arriving just as the sun was
setting over Lake Superior and the waves were high and wild. Inside, he’d
lit the kerosene lamps and eaten supper by lamplight.
Carstairs felt the vast emptiness of the cabin all around him and he
knew he’d made a terrible mistake coming back up here today.
Edith had been a real Canadian girl. She’d loved the cabin when she
was alive and he’d felt her presence
everywhere,
even on the weekends
he’d come up on his own to fish, leaving her back in the city with their
son and daughter. He saw her blue earthenware pitcher on a shelf by the
sink. When she was alive it had always been full of wildflowers—masses
of goldenrod, bouquets of Pink Lady’s Slipper, wild purple harebell.
Her watercolours of the hard granite shoreline were hanging
throughout the cabin. Carstairs knew that if he brought one of the
kerosene lamps over to the pine walls outside the ring of yellow light,
he’d see them there, under three year’s worth of dust. But he realized he
didn’t want to see them. She was gone, and no alchemy between his own
loss and memory and the wild forest magic of this rocky coastline was
going to render vivid something that had forever left his life.
Carstairs wept at that realization which, to him, was like watching
her die all over again. His sobs made his shoulders ache. Around him,
the silence and the darkness seemed to swell and expand till it was vast
and huge, and he filled it with a loud keening that came from a deep and
terrible empty place inside. He had never felt older or weaker—or more
alone—in his life.
When Carstairs felt he had no more tears to shed, he splashed water
on his face and pressed a cold washcloth to his eyes. He briefly thought of
leaving the cabin that night, but he was a practical man—it was late and
he was too tired to drive. It would be dangerous. Before he went to bed,
he set his alarm clock for five a.m. He intended to get an early start back
to the city, then telephone a realtor from home and put the place on the
market. He mounted the stairs to the upper floor, holding the kerosene
lantern in front of him, looking straight ahead. Then he undressed and
climbed into the cold double bed.
Asleep, his Edith had come to him like an angel of mercy and comfort.
In the dream, Edith was a still just a girl from Trout Creek he’d fallen
head over heels for as a student at Wesley College in Winnipeg in 1929.
She was young like she had been on their wedding day. In the dream, there
was no cancer—and in fact, never would be any cancer. Edith opened her
plump, tanned arms to him and said,
Where have you been, Alan? I’ve been
waiting for you. I’ve missed you so, my darling. It’s so beautiful here
.
When he woke in the darkness, it was a grinning Richard Weal he
was holding in his arms and the foetor of spoiled meat, body waste, and
decay was everywhere.
Carstairs didn’t see the knives at first, but he felt them immediately.
In the end, his death had come much more quickly than Edith’s
had—though, like hers, it was not without pain. Weal had been leisurely
with his tools this time, and he’d enjoyed himself very much.
After he was finished, Weal re-lit the kerosene lamp on the dining
room table and washed his knives and hammers in the kitchen sink,
enjoying the cozy
thump-thump-thump
as the water from the copper
bottom of the sink sluiced away hair and flesh and blood from the various
blades. He dried them carefully so they wouldn’t rust.
Upstairs, he wrapped the various segments of Carstairs’s body in
bloodied sheets and tied them with baling twine. Then he carried them
downstairs and buried them on the property, deep enough so the animals
wouldn’t dig them up for food when the winter freeze made their hunger
savage.
In the darkness, he bathed naked in the icy waters of the inlet,
screaming when the cold burned his skin. Then he dried himself with
a rough towel, rubbing hard to bring the warmth back to his limbs. He
found clean clothes hanging in the bedroom closets of the cabin. They
smelled a bit musty and were slightly big for him, but he dressed quickly.
Weal packed the remaining clothes he’d found in the closet into the duffel
bag Carstairs had brought for this trip to the lake.
Rifling through Carstairs’s wallet, Weal found five hundred dollars
and several credit cards. He left the credit cards, knowing they could be
used to track him if it should come to that. But he doubted it would. It
wouldn’t be long now till his life changed.
The voice had grown stronger and clearer, and more urgent, like a
radio signal in his brain. It faded in and out as he drew closer, or veered
away, from its source.
But tonight the voice had been very, very clear. Clearer than it had
ever been.
Weal could picture his Friend—for that is indeed how he had come
to think of the voice in his head, as a loving Friend, one who’d been his
closest companion since the night he’d first heard it five years before—suffocating beneath mounds of flinty soil and shield rock, choking on
clods of cold earth, struggling to be free, screaming in the suffocating
darkness of the centuries.
And when he’d lapped the blood from Alan Carstairs’s slashed
throat, his holiest of personal communion rituals, an image of the place
had seared itself into his brain. It had appeared entirely unbidden, but it
was clear as an Ektachrome slide.
Wake me,
his Friend pleaded.
You are close, very close, to the place you
seek. Find me. Wake me. I will repay you with rewards beyond your wildest
imaginings. I will raise you up to a god.
Twelve-year-old Finnegan Miller
liked to get up when the house was
still quiet, while his parents were still fast asleep in their room upstairs,
and take his black Labrador, Sadie, for a long walk around Bradley Lake.
In October, he woke before sunrise. His routine was unvaried: he dressed
in his room, fed Sadie in the kitchen, found her favourite red rubber ball,
then put on a jacket and slipped out the back door of the house with
Sadie at his heels.
In short order, she’d run ahead, tail wagging, nose to the ground and
he’d be the one following her instead of the other way around.
Bradley Lake was half a mile from his house on Childs Drive. To
call it a “lake” would flatter it, especially given the proximity of Parr’s
Landing to the shore of Lake Superior, which always seemed to Finn to
be more like an ocean. According to legend, Lake Superior never gave
up its dead, and in school, Finn had learned about the terrible history
of shipwrecks during storms of almost supernatural ferocity there—the
wreck of the
Mataafa Storm
in 1905, the
Cyprus
in 1907, the
Inkerman
and
Cerisoles
minesweepers in 1918. Surely, Finn thought, no body of
water that carnivorous, with that much of a taste for human flesh should
rightly be called a lake.
But Bradley Lake was a lake—vast, serene, with water so deep and
cold it often looked black. Rising directly above it were a tiered grouping
of rocky outcrops of Canadian Shield granite cliffs surrounded by a rich
taiga forest of black spruce, jack pine, and Ontario balsam poplar.
Once at the lake, the path Finn took was a mile and a half around
and lined with paper birch and balsam fir. When he was younger, he’d
heard stories of coming upon bush animals in the darkness, but he’d only
ever seen one—a buck, last fall—and it had run off when Sadie started
to bark and chase it. He’d tried to restrain her but in the end he realized
that not only would she never catch the buck, she would have turned
tail immediately if it had ever stopped and turned towards her with its
antlers lowered.
Finn’s father had for a time urged him to let him train Sadie for
hunting, but Finn despised the idea of hunting, and his father, who
had learned which battles to pick with his son, decided to let it drop.
Sadie’s status as Finn’s best friend—indeed, his only friend—was thus
enshrined. This morning ritual hike, with Sadie bounding ahead of him
through the bush, was sacrosanct. It was a ritual that was only ever
interrupted if Finn was sick or injured, which he rarely was. On those
mornings, Sadie would lie beside his bed in his room and whine pitifully
until she realized he wasn’t ignoring her, but wasn’t able to take her out.
Then she would lay her head on her front paws and look up at him with
reproachful amber eyes.
Sometimes she brought the red rubber ball to him and dropped it at
the foot of the bed, as though it were the most marvellous idea ever.
Finn enjoyed the darkness and the silence of this last hour of night
best in the late autumn, when the air coming in off Superior was damp
and raw, and the yellow and red leaves on the trees lining the path
showered water down on him when he accidentally knocked them as he
passed by.